Poultry News

Research provides possibility to automate grading of woody breast fillets

14 March 2018

TUCKER, Georgia, 14 March 2018 – USPOULTRY and the USPOULTRY Foundation announce the completion of a funded research project at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in which research demonstrates the possibility to automate grading of woody breast fillets

The research is made in part by an endowing Foundation gift from George’s Inc. and is part of the Association’s comprehensive research programme encompassing all phases of poultry and egg production and processing. A brief summary of the completed project is shown below. A complete report, along with information on other Association research, may be obtained by going to USPOULTRY’s website. The project summary is as follows.

Project #F072: The Use of Vision Grading of Broiler Carcasses to Predict Presence of Woody Breast Characteristics

(Dr Casey Owens, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas)

In a recently completed research project, Dr Casey Owens at the Department of Poultry Science, University of Arkansas, used automated vision grading to detect the woody breast condition in broiler carcasses prior to evisceration. Dr Owens found that using various measurements of the breast area of the carcass provided a strong prediction of the presence of woody breast in the fillets. Further development of this system may provide processors a valuable tool to sort breast fillets according to the presence and severity of woody breast.